Annual Webster Lecture with Caitie Barrett (Cornell University) "Household Archaeology and the Domestication of Empire: Egyptian Landscapes at Pompeii"

Talk Description:

In the Roman empire, the idea of “Egypt” could evoke a dizzying array of associations that included fascination, fear, contempt, religious piety, intellectual curiosity, fetishization, and beyond – potentially all at once. At the same time, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking material and visual culture became ubiquitous in Roman Italy. This paper explores the human impact of this “domestication of empire” through a case study: the Nilotic landscapes in an outdoor dining space in the House of the Ephebe at Pompeii. As representations of a distant land under Roman rule, these Pompeian images provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which the experience of empire was embedded within everyday life. In addition to the house owners and their guests, I explore some of the ways that non-elite and enslaved individuals in the household might have interacted with this imagery. I also consider the affordances that this garden assemblage could have offered to another possible audience within Roman houses: namely, children, for whom these materializations of an imagined “Egypt” would have participated in their early socialization.

Biography:

Caitie Barrett (Professor of Classics, Cornell) is an archaeologist who investigates everyday life, religious experience, and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. She is currently co-directing the Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii and working on a new book about the archaeology of ancient Greek household religion. Her publications include two books about interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world (Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion, Brill, 2011; Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens, Oxford University Press, 2019) and a co-edited volume about houses and households in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (Households in Context: Dwelling in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, Cornell University Press, 2023). Her research has received national and international grants from sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Geographic Society, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Research Center in Egypt, Dumbarton Oaks, the International Catacomb Society, the Rust Family Foundation, and Sigma Xi.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.